Parks Dept. Scrambles To Rid Parks of Illegal Activities
Days after a newspaper article exposed the presence of prostitution, chop shops, and homeless encampments in some city parks, the parks department is scrambling to clear the signs of recurring problems.
Yesterday, parks department employees removed two cars from the Fresh Creek Nature Preserve in Brooklyn, where they had been placed on cinder blocks and gutted in an alleged chop shop that was hidden by the overgrowth. Its existence was first reported by the New York Post.
The New York Sun found the department's employees had erected several 3-foot-high piles of sand to bar the chop shop's organizers from reclaiming the area and driving in new vehicles. The cars are driven from the Belt Parkway through a roadside clearing and into the park, where they're placed on cinder blocks and their parts are removed and illegally sold.
Left behind were piles of tires, scattered construction waste, broken glass, and acres of shoulder-high invasive plants that hide a variety of activities.
This is a temporary solution to a short-lived problem, the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said of the chop shop. "We regularly go into these places and remove illegal dumping. We do massive operations," he said.
According to the president of the watchdog group New York City Park Advocates, Geoffrey Croft, the parks department has removed the stolen cars once a year for the past three years. "And every time they put up a 3-foot sand pile, as if that were a solution. It would take a couple of guys a few minutes to level that," he said.
At Calvert Vaux Park — formerly Dreier-Offerman Park — in Coney Island, a tent city that was reportedly used by homeless people was leveled Tuesday. Although the waist-high weeds had been flattened, beer bottles and clothing piles remained, as did evidence of the former residents' intent to come back — one person's bicycle was locked to a tree.
According to Mr. Benepe, the homeless encampments in Calvert Vaux Park are on private land, not city parkland.
"Anyone can go to the parks department's Web site and see that this is parks department land," Mr. Croft said.
He frequently butts heads with Mr. Benepe, as the two have fundamentally different views of what how parks such as Calvert Vaux and Fresh Creek should be treated.
"We concentrate our maintenance efforts on the parks that people use," Mr. Benepe said, noting that existing resources don't permit every park to be kept in perfect condition.
For Mr. Croft, it is "the city's negligence that prevents the public from enjoying wonderful public places," not the lack of public demand.
Calvert Vaux and Fresh Creek are both former landfills that were bought by the city and never developed. The city has planned a $40 million redevelopment project in Calvert Vaux Park, but construction has yet to begin.
"We always gave priority to developed parkland," a former parks commissioner, Henry Stern, said. "They're basically triage decisions as to what you can fix and what you can't."
"A lot of these areas — you might call them the untended fringes of the emerald empire — simply don't get the attention that Rome does," he said.
